The present invention relates to a field of augmented reality display, and more particularly to an augmented reality display method and device.
Augmented Reality (hereafter, simply referred to as AR) is a technology, which applies virtual information to real world, overlaps the virtual information and a real environment in real time, and performs interactions with the use of a computer, also known as mixed reality. AR provides information that cannot be directly conceived from real world, so as to expand our perception.
Early AR systems employ a desktop computer or a work station as a system-operating platform, and employ a perspective head-mounted display as a fusion display device. These systems are only applicable for laboratory environments and not applicable for outdoor environments, since being lack of good mobility.
In recently years, with the development of mobile computing devices and mobile Internet, AR technology has become more widely used on mobile devices. For example, it is possible to see related information about peripheral objects in real time with the use of an AR application on a smartphone, as shown in FIG. 1.
The application of AR technology on the mobile devices is according to the principles of: 1) obtaining environmental image information around a mobile device by a camera of the mobile device; 2) recognizing various objects in the environmental image with the use of image recognition technology; 3) extracting, according the recognition result, relevant additional information of the various objects from an existing information library, and tagging the additional information on the real environmental images where the various objects locate.
In this kind of AR applications, since all of the additional information of all the recognized objects is tagged on the same two dimensional image plane and is lack of necessary three-dimensional depth information, for scenes with great difference between the depths of objects, the tagged additional information might be appeared to be lack of realism because of no depth. As shown in FIG. 2, there are differences of depth between various buildings in real environment and all the tagged AR information (black semi-transparent text block) is on the same image plane, without depth information. There exists ambiguity about correspondences between buildings and respective AR information, and it is difficult to find the corresponding building with AR information, which means it is hard to distinguish which AR information belongs to which building, and it is lack of realism.
Specifically, as for an AR application in a see-through wearable glasses device (such as GOOGLE GLASS (a type of wearable technology with an optical head-mounted display)), since various objects that are seen-through glasses are real instead of object images acquired by cameras, it has real depths among various objects. However, all the AR information it can present is on the same image plane, and is lack of depth information.
Thus, there is a demand for an augmented reality information tagging method suitable for wearable glasses devices, which enables AR information of objects to be overlapped on real objects correctly, and enables the same depth as the real object to be provided.